Hannah Barco is a performance artist, writer, object maker, and facilitator of relational situations; making work with the stuff of everyday life. Barco works from a Fluxus sense of humor and poetry, a Surrealist obsession with the uncanny, and stands firmly within the Feminist legacy that the personal is political. Her practice uncovers and follows the meaning, emotion and capacity for storytelling available within everyday things. In her research into the materiality and praxis of everyday life, Barco aligns the gestures in her work with an urgent need to reconsider our ideas of dignity, survival, remembrance, attention, poverty, inheritance and social responsibility. Barco considers "remembrance" as a responsibility, and storytelling as a form of respect—behaviors born of Barco’s Jewish and Southern upbringing. While her work is not directly autobiographical, it is deeply personal and imbued with emotion. Objects in flux, in motion, modified, on display, in the making, or even at play become the medium to trace connected nodes of people and things in our contemporary society and our history. Barco then asks, in what networks are we participating? Her practice aims to attune her audiences to what kinds of futures we are producing. Barco has performed, displayed and produced her work in Chicago; Boston; New York; Durham, North Carolina; Oakland, California; and Prague. Venues include, in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Artists Coalition, Sullivan Galleries, Hyde Park Art Center, Defibrillator Gallery and Grace Exhibitions, as well as the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and Mobius Performance Collective. Hannah Barco is Chicago-based artist with roots in Durham, North Carolina. She received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University in Boston, MA. She earned her MFA in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about Hannah Barco’s HATCH exhibition A History-shaped Hole in the Universe.
HATCH Projects